Blog for dups

Monday Aug 10, 2009

It is always hard to write these type of posts. It has been a busy ten months for me in the MySQL Community Team and sadly, all too soon it seems, the world changes and I find myself moving to the other side of the fence. As of August 14th, I will no longer be with Sun Microsystems.

Okay, before you get any conspiracy theories, the reasons are simple and personal. I am moving on to see what I can do to found my own startup completely unrelated to developing databases though I fully intend to use MySQL in the near future and if possible, all my life. Sometimes in life you get opportunities given to you which are rare and if you don't jump then regret is all you have, and that is something I refuse to live with.

As for MySQL, I am extremely sad to leave some of the coolest, brightest and most fun people in the world (and by this I mean all of the MySQL and Drizzle folks at Sun). I never thought an extrovert like myself would enjoy working in a distributed environment and make good friends, but darn it, I feel like I'm leaving a family, a very talented, dedicated, passionate family whose collective child happens to be a piece of software that has changed the world. In particular I am very sad to say goodbye to the two teams within MySQL (Web/Marketing and Community) with whom I have worked closely: I will miss you. I will forever cherish the time at MySQL and Sun.

To those in the greater MySQL Community, thank you for your help. I hope I will see you at conferences, meetings and naturally online. There are many open source projects that I hope to get involved with as part of my new/past ideas and work. Some of it will be MySQL related albeit loosely (Gearman) and some in different directions (monitoring, web frameworks) as well as exploring more of what it means to be a "Community" on the web. So yes, I will be around.

If you want to follow me, you can follow my personal blog at http://www.dups.ca/blog (which at this point is hopelessly outdated but that will change in time) and I will be available through Facebook and LinkedIn. If you want my personal email address leave a message here and I will e-mail you :)